


The Sound of Birdsong

by LittleRaven



Category: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: Sybel, and the different calls throughout her life.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Sound of Birdsong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mythicbeast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythicbeast/gifts).



There were songs once, of animals strange in all their luring. Her father knew them all, or so it seemed to Sybel. She wondered if he knew her too; he had sung one to her mother, and drawn her in like the Falcon, and the great Cats. 

He would want her, she decided, just as much. The wizard had his power, and his collection, and she was part of it. She would give him no reason to call her, to sing into the stillness of her mind. 

What reason, anyway, could she have to leave, give him cause to sing? 

Her father was not gentle. She did not think to require it of him. He did not require it of her. Only that she learn, as he did, and care for the animals she was to inherit. Sybel was well pleased enough to be good at these things. 

He did not ask if she was pleased, as the wind did not ask if it should blow colder, or fiercer, or more softly with the changing of the seasons. The animals did not ask him, or let him know if he had pleased them. 

If he had, Sybel supposed, she might have known what to do when they began speaking to her. She did not have a model to look upon. She must judge by herself. Was the lake beautiful enough for the Black Swan? Could it be better, remind her of the jeweled landscape of the northern lakes she had flown above, before her grandfather Myk had called her away to where she could no longer fly into the sunset? She could see it in the Black Swan’s mind, where she held her name. 

It had done no harm to her for them to speak. It would do no harm to listen. 

Sybel did not ask, when she returned to the mountain. Nor did the animals ask her. Ter had told them all, and they knew without a word the nature of what she would need from them. They were well used to doing what they were bade to, and she had asked little enough, before Ogam’s death and after it. 

Someone had called her, like they had been called, like her mother, and more than calling would have been done. They understood, perhaps better than she did. The thought passed through her mind, but did not still her. 

If they fought, if it made them miserable, she would let them go free. If they did not, and she did not anticipate that they would, then they would stay, and they would all live with what she had wrought. 

They would live with it longer, she reflected, and care less. What did it matter to them, to do the things which had once brought them, in songs and tales, across Eldwold and beyond? There would be stories for them again, and their names would no longer go half-forgotten, buried in books owned by wizards who could not even open them.

There would be stories, and she would be in them. The wizard of Eld, the witch of Sirle, perhaps, weaving her plots and her magic the way other women wove tapestries for their walls and cloaks for their husbands. 

What kind of tapestry would she have in her hands, after all this was done? What would she see in its design? She would hang it up—at Sirle, because it could not belong in the white house, which felt already like it belonged to another wizard she would not meet, and Coren would look at it. He would see it, the design of her heart and mind, and know her at last, as she was coming to know the self she had almost lost. 

She drew a breath. They were not questions to be considered now. She would act, as she always had, to serve herself, and this time more than those who had been in the white house on Eld Mountain would know what that looked like. 

It was empty. It was not her house, anymore. She did not look for it to be her house. Sybel sat under the dome, blind, the sky changing above her with the summer days.

She had always sat so, when she called. Animal, king, lordling. She no longer had a being to call to, a direction for her mind to go in. She did not pick any, and it ran like she had on Gyld as she fled here on him, because there was no place for her to go, but inwards where there was only her own name, and farther than that, deeper than any dream where sleep could take her.

She woke to Tam, and his hands on her hair were another place to go to, if for a little while. Maelga was yet another, and so was the forest itself, bright under the sun which burned through her hair—more than she had ever been used to, sitting inside with her mind doing the wandering. 

Her mind turned to the calling, and to the places where her animals were not. She remembered, then, the one who had never answered. 

Coren came instead. 

She had never called him while knowing it; knowing it, he had never failed to come. He could hear her, even now when she could not understand why he would wish to listen. 

But he did, and he looked, too, and did not turn away from her. 

Sybel had not asked it of him. Since he gave it her, she gave in turn what he had asked of her once. She told him what she needed of him.

It was something, to be afraid and still speak. _To feel_ , she remembered Maelga said, and understood the truth of the words. 

She had never not felt, like the earth in which so many things of nature and people both were buried, and it seemed that earth was ready to bear fruit.

White bird, she had called herself before, and she would fly as the Black Swan, as Ter, as Gyld. As the Liralen who stood before her, voice singing in her mind, wings ready for the force of the wind.


End file.
